From the WWE/Indy Rumour Mill: Ricochet gives farewell speech backstage after NJPW King of Pro-Wrestling; is he WWE bound?

What's the story?

New Japan Pro Wrestling have released a series of backstage interviews showing wrestler's reactions to their matches at the October 9th King of Pro-Wrestling show.

Buried amongst them is an interesting interview with Funky Future, who had just lost their IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team titles with Ricochet, seemingly saying thank you and goodbye to Ryusuke Taguchi.

In case you didn't know...

Trevor Mann, who is sometimes known as Richochet, or Prince Puma, has been the subject of intense speculation recently over whether or not the popular Indy star is about to sign for the WWE.

Mann's contract for Lucha Underground expired in July which was the catalyst for this speculation. However, things seemed to be reaching a fever pitch with Dave Meltzer tweeting and discussing the matter regularly saying that the WWE would be foolish not to sign the free agent.

The heart of the matter

In the video, at around the 17:20 mark, Ricochet is apologetic blaming himself for the loss to Roppongi 3K, he then goes on to thank everyone, including New Japan and the fans. Here's a full extract below.

"Thank you, thank you everything, today wasn't obviously my best day, maybe I've got things going on in my head, maybe I've got things happening but today was my fault, so I just wanted to say thank you coach, thank you for having me at Taguchi Japan, one of the best groups I've ever been in, thank you New Japan, thank you fans, thank you everybody, sorry folks, sorry."

What's next?

He's dropped all the titles he had, he's made what seems to me to be a clear-cut farewell speech, can we go ahead and say that it's fairly likely that Richochet will be debuting for the WWE at some point in the near future.

Author's Take

Whilst the loss of Richochet in New Japan will be a big one, the gain to the WWE will be huge if he does indeed show up on Raw, SmackDown or NXT. I've got my fingers crossed that all the signs we're seeing are, in fact, actually signs and that this is definitely in the process of happening.